Ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. This web site is my attempt to document, from my perspective, these "interesting times".

Thursday, March 04, 2004

Cynicism

Kevin Drum let's his cynical side do the talking this morning:

I (and Brad) live in a state which last October was facing a $10 billion
budget hole. We responded by electing a governor who promised to "stop
the crazy deficit spending." As soon as he took office he increased the
deficit by $4 billion by cutting vehicle license fees. Then in December he
proposed to finance this tax cut by issuing an extra $4 billion* in bonds.
Yesterday my fellow citizens eagerly approved this bond issue by a wide
margin. At the same time they made it clear in no uncertain terms that they
will not put up with any tax increases whatsoever as a means of addressing the
deficit.

My point? What makes us think that the people of America are interested in
someone who is competent, steeped in the issues, and allergic to the magic
asterisk? As near as I can tell, they are far more likely to vote for people
who (a) lie to them, (b) cut their taxes, and (c) pretend that a magic
asterisk really will make the deficits caused by their tax cuts go
away. The American public is practically addicted to the magic asterisk.

I've commented before that one of the things that appealed to me about Howard
Dean was that he was a doctor and he had a doctor's sensibility when it came to
approaching the problems we are facing today. When you go to your doctor you
don't want him to be political in his diagnosis. You don't want him to fool you
into thinking that things aren't as bad as they might be. You want brutal
honesty. A doctor who doesn't warn a morbidly obese patient that they are eating
themselves to death is an irresponsible doctor who should lose their license.

A politician who does the same thing wins re-election.

People say they don't want their leaders to lie to them. That is a
lie. They just want them to tell the right kind of lie.